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needs. Career mentors may not be able to inform the specific research questions of the mentee, for example, but can provide overall direction and advice about career trajectory and big-picture questions. Research mentors may not be able to speak specifically on career issues faced by the mentee but are crucial to developing the research agenda of the mentee. Co-mentors also can provide input on more specialized conduct and also may provide opportunities for other collaborations or work. Many people have a research mentor, a career mentor, personal mentor, etc. It may be project specific advice, career advice, or personal advice that you need. You may want local, national, or international networking. Sometimes the line between mentor and personal friend can become blurred when one person serves both roles. There is nothing intrinsically wrong with this, but both parties should be aware when this occurs. In settings with strong personal bonds, the mentor’s advice can occasionally become tainted by their own personal interests. One example would be when competitive job offers arise. Not wanting your mentee to leave your shop might result in not giving the best advice. WHAT DO MENTORS WANT FROM A MENTEE? Mentors uniformly want their mentees to be productive and successful. They also generally like their mentees to be respectful, be committed, and have a strong work ethic. By being organized, planning for your meetings, showing up on time, and meeting deadlines the mentee can demonstrate a commitment to the relationship. 16 CHAPTER 3 — WHY DO I NEED A MENTOR, AND HOW DO I FIND ONE? It is critical that the mentor and mentee have similar expectations about the roles they will each play. In this 24-hour-a-day e-mail world, both need to understand the acceptable time frame to respond to each other. The mentee should understand that the whole world does not revolve around him or her. The mentor should understand that oftentimes the mentee hits a wall and cannot move forward without advice from him or her. We believe that mentees should bear most of the responsibility for initiating impromptu meetings and pursuing an intentional mentor-mentee relationship. This can range from setting up scheduled meetings (discussed in the next section) and, depending on the mentor (e.g., career mentor, scholarly mentor) to actively creating a career development or research development plan to discuss and reevaluate with the respective mentor at designated times, even if just once or twice a year. Reviewing these short-term and longterm professional goals can be important in giving the mentor a clearer idea of where the mentee wants to be and how to help her or him achieve those goals. A good mentor will provide opportunity for the mentee, whether it is with individual projects, invited writings or committee work. It is important that the mentor not overwhelm the mentee with too many opportunities. The opportunities should not be so plentiful that they cannot get their primary work done or that it interferes with activities outside of work. Communication and open dialogue about expectations is important at all times. HOW CAN MENTEES GET THE MOST FROM THE MENTOR-MENTEE RELATIONSHIP? This is one of the most common questions from mentees. Even with the best, most wellintentioned mentor, the logistics of making the most out of this somewhat artificial but crucial relationship are difficult and should be defined ideally before the beginning of this relationship. Depending on the structure of the department and location of the mentor, a more “freeform” or informal style could work. This is ideal if your mentor is within your department and your offices are located near each other, and there is a fairly predictable amount of regular interaction that comes from that setting. In many cases mentors may be found outside of the department, or even a different hospital. In this situation, regular scheduled meetings are ideal. Without regular, scheduled interactions, it would be difficult to extract any benefit from these relationships. Regularly scheduled meetings should be established, even if there are no “issues” to discuss beforehand. While this may seem to counter every time management argument about only scheduling meetings with defined agendas, for these relationships we would argue that the concept of having strictly defined issues before every meeting could be counterproductive. For most meetings, of course, there will be natural questions or points of discussion that arise from working on projects together. One person with such a relationship describes the following advantages of this format: … For my primary mentor and me, for example, because many of our areas of research in fact did not overlap, these times could be spent on nonresearch but equally important issues: How do I hire someone? What kinds of human resource rules do I need to be aware of? What kind of direction do you see my line of research going? How do you organize your work? We found that these standing meetings — which we could cancel if there was truly nothing we needed to discuss — were beneficial to us. This stands in contrast to my secondary mentor, who was at the School of Nursing and was someone I only met twice — once when I asked her to be my mentor, and another time one 

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